General - Reference

I have been doing general research for the studio for the last week now. I've found this site, The Home Recording Connection that seems to have a lot of low cost solutions to home studios.

Of particular interest was the article on building your isolation room.

I've continued to formulate how to build the recording space(s) and I think that it might still be do-able to put the isolation room on the right side of the garage (facing the house), which makes things work out nicely for house access, etc. It gives the benefit of only having to install one door and keeping the noise further from the living room. It has the added detriment of having to more heavily insulate the outer wall. I'm also convinced that the closet in the upstairs entertainment room (which will probably end up being the control room) will make a good vocal booth without giving up the storage space. More ideas all the time!

Isolation Room - Design

I talked to Tony DiCuffa this morning about building the isolation room. He's had some experience creating home theatre systems so he offered some "best-bang-for-your-buck" style advice.

• Slant the Walls - It should be easy to add some extra slant to make a trapezoidal room, which will make for better acoustics.
• Stagger the 2x4s in the walls - Such that there is no 2x4 that is touching both the inner and outer sheet rock.
• Use 4-inch tubing for air conditioning - in 3 places throughout the room, this will cool down the room and not mess with the pressure as long as the door is opened every couple of hours.
• Use Bicycle Tire for joining - The rubber will absorb more of the sound so less will be transferred to the next item that it is being joined with. This will be a cheap way to prevent sound from transferring all the way through the house via the frame
• Use Liquid Nails - to hang the sheet rock liquid nails will act as another way of stopping the sound from travelling through to other mediums.

Click here to see my rudimentary drawings of the plans.

DAW - Research

This week I set up my computer with the Planet CCRMA kernel (low-latency) and the ALSA sound drivers on my crappy little sound card and single-processor VIA chipset POS computer. I installed Audacity, Ardour, and Hydrogen to mess around with.

Ardour wouldn't start because I didn't have the patch installed that allowed non-root users to start the Jack server. Audacity worked fine though, even though ALSA was running--which is weird because Audacity only uses the OSS layer and it says in the Planet CCRMA documentation that ALSA cannot run with the OSS libs loaded. I'm not complaining either way.

Anyway. I was messing with a song Tom and I wrote last weekend and constructed the drum track in Hydrogen, threw it into Audacity and recorded my Acoustic over it. You can check out the result after a little noise reduction here.

Isolation Room - Reference

In doing research for the isolation room, I've come across some recommended reading material that I'll try to get my hands on.

• Drywall Hanging - A book on how to hang drywall right. Now, I'm sure that it's so that the drywall looks good and is smoothe, and may be overkill for this project, but it's a good skill to pick up, right?
• Building a Recording Studio - Dealing with the acoustics of the isolation and the control room. I think this would be very helpful to read in the planning stages of this project.
• Modern Recording Techniques - I was suggested this by Patrick Turbiville who recorded our first album. He set up his studio and this was at the top of the list of things to do when I told him I wanted to build my own.

Also, Lucas Pettey from my band is going to put me in touch with an acoustic designer he knows from Florida to get a quick 20-30 minute phone consulation on the job. It should be very valuable to get the input from someone who can take the specifics of the situation into account and has practical experience.

Isolation Room - Initial Design

After talking over issues with my wife and considering the location of things, I think the isolation room can be constructed inside the garage, using the main house entry way as the main door, with the possibility of hanging another door so that someone can walk through the studio from the garage.

Materials:

• Drywall : about 600 sq feet. Parts of the wall will be used for the construction on 2 sides, and then an extra layer of drywall with 1" gaps all the way around. The walls will need to be filled with insulation of some sort, but creativity may be required.
• Barriers : Looking at about 490 sq feet of barriers to cover the inside walls and to lay inside the celiing of the attic, or attach to the ceiling, although that could also cause some problems with sound transmission into the attic and then out the various ventalation ducts
• Acoustic Foam : Some type of acoustic deadening stuff. Foam egg-crate mattresses might be the cheap solution to the problem.
• Floors : Since it's on the foundation, most of what needs to happen is to deaden the sound. 1 layer of carpet or carpet underlay, 1 or 2 layers of plywood, and another layer of carpet on top to look nice and keep the instruments all in place (read : drums)

After all this, the room should be about 16x8.5 on the outside and about 15x8 on the inside with about a 7 foot ceiling. This will leave room for another car in the garage and leave the storage space too. Prior to building, I intend to go to Musiclab and set everything up in a 15'x8' space to see what it feels like.

A few things to consider before ordering anything:

• Putting up a window on the inside so that a bassist could jam outside the room but still see the people inside.
• Putting up a door on the indside of the garage so that there is a path from the garage into the house
• Ventaliation that keeps the noise out
• How to properly sound-proof the door hanging in the garage -- mostly this will involve making appropriate seals around the door

The budget for this portion of the project is an even $1000. If I can build an isolation room for 1K, then the rest should fall more and more into place.

Isolation Room - Research

The first phase of the project that I'll tackle will be the most critical. Setting up the isolation room will determine whether or not the project will succeed or fail. Not having a good place to record with awesome equipment will equal sucky recordings.

The following links begin my research for building a soundproofed area somewhere in my house.

• Building a Home Studio (Structure and Construction)
• A Quick Guide to Building a Home Recording or Practice Studio (Soundproofing)

Budget Linux Audio Studio Project

What is the BLASP, you ask? Well, it's a little project I've begun that aims to create a home recording studio capable of recording an album on par with indie-music releases, using nothing but GNU/Linux and Open Source Software on a budget of $5555.55. Not a penny more.

So what is this going to involve? I'm so glad you asked! Here's the breakdown.

1. Create a Sound-proofed Isolation Room
   • Large enough for a 3 or 4 piece band to play inside
   • Appropriate ventalation while minimizing sound transmission from both outside the isolation room in, and from the inside out
2. Build a DAW using only Open Source Software
   • Dual Processor (No VIA Chipset) AMD
   • Minimum 7200 RPM IDE Drives in a Firewire Chasis (hopefully SCSI)
   • High Quality 8 or 16 Channel Sound Card (Hammerfall?)
   • A Low Latency Kernel
   • Fully Functional Recording/Editing Application (like Ardour)
3. Create a Recording Environment
   • Drum Mics (2 compressor overheads, 3 tom mics, 1 snare, 1 kick)
   • Elec Guitar (2 compressor)
   • Acoustic Guitar (2 matched mics cardiordal)
   • Vocal Mics (2 -- not sure on specs)
   • Monitoring System - in ear monitors? Headphones?
   • Mixing Board?

The final Phase of this project will be to record a demo which will have been rehearsed, recorded, and mixed in this environment.

Since two restrictions have been placed on this project, quality and cost, time will not be restricted. The project is hoped to be complete by the end of 2005.